June 20, 2008
SocialThing, a Boulder, Colorado TechStars startup that aggregates all your online social updates into one slick lifestream, launched into private beta this past March in Austin, Texas at the South By Southwest Interactive event. I got a chance to get a preview of the product the week before as SocialThing showed off its stuff at TECH cocktail Boulder. I was impressed and have been using it online and via the iPhone version ever since.
Just a few weeks ago, SocialThing rolled out version 2.0 of the product. The previous version was pretty but version 2.0 looks even better than before. It offers users more control of the presentation via the settings. For example users can now sort by friends or by time. Users can also allow others to link directly to a public profile with controls on what appears in the feed. SocialThing has reworked the way they retrieve updates from all your favorite services so that updates are not pulled back in a constant flow but are batched. This allows SocialThing to indicate when there are additional updates that you might want to refresh your page to receive. Additionally, they have rolled out a new iPhone application that allows for on-the-go posting of status and trolling of your lifestream. It is pretty slick.
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June 3, 2008
Filtrbox, a Boulder-based startup which was founded about a year ago as part of the first TechStars program, will soon be launching a self-service business-grade keyword driven alerts product. Filtrbox offers keyword driven media search which includes the blogosphere & mainstream news.
I was intrigued by the five person filtrbox team when they demoed at TECH cocktail Boulder back in March 2008. I recently got a more thoroughly overview of the private beta product as they approach a public beta launch and I wanted to share my thoughts on the product.
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February 22, 2008
Eyespot, the online video editing site that I previously reviewed with very high marks, has released a new set of tools to make personalization and syndication of videos. The tools include the ability to share to a mobile device or to a number of other video platforms with just one click.
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February 4, 2008
FeedHub, the Pittsburgh-based startup created by mSpoke, has just announced an update aimed at improving the relevancy of its personalized feed creator. I covered FeedHub when they launched back in September 2007, since then they have received a lot of user feedback which they used to plan and execute on this latest update.
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January 31, 2008
myAOL, the personalized startpage suite, has added a little more personal flair to its offering by launching the ability to select themes or skins for each page or tab on your personal dashboard. Now in addition to changing the background color users can select from one of six themes.
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January 24, 2008
Ask.com rolled out Ask 3D search in June 2006 and I was pleased by its simple, beautiful design which enables users to select from a couple of skins or backgrounds for the search experience. Ask has just enhanced the feature to offer users the ability to create their own skins for the Ask 3D experience. Users can now simply add there own skins to customize the Ask search background to any photo that they like. It takes about a minute or less to do and is actually quite fun.
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January 9, 2008
Music makes the world go round. OUTSHOUTS, a Palo Alto, California based three employee startup, takes music going 'round seriously as it enables anyone to create and send their own mixes of music over email and text message directly to your mobile phone. OUTSHOUTS lets anyone become DJ to mix music tracks with your recorded voice and pre-recorded music or other content.
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December 10, 2007
Managing information overload can be a bit of a task these days with all the blogs, feeds and other content options out there on the Web and filling up my feed reader. How can a user better navigate to the items that might interest them the most? This is a tough problem to solve as every users is different. AideRSS is trying to solve this problem by helping to filter out the noise to deliver only the content that matters to the most.
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November 19, 2007
Dawdle, a Chicago-based startup, recently launched to offer video game lovers a new place to buy and sell games, gaming systems and accessories. Dawdle tries to take the hassle out searching for items online by devoting the site to matching buyers with sellers via an innovative matching engine.
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October 31, 2007
If you don't understand the value of Twitter you might want to listen now. I was just on Twitter checking some friend updates when I saw one of my Twitter friends yelled, "EARTHQUAKE!" The earthquake hit just outside of San Jose but thanks to Twitter I had personalized alerts from several friends in the area as soon as the quake hit.
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October 27, 2007
I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.
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October 18, 2007
We all have special days in history for one reason or another. Maybe your special day is your birthday, an anniversary or the day you started your blog. Now you have the opportunity to purchase that day in history on the web. MyDaySpace.com, a St Louis based startup, launched recently to enable users to create a Web page dedicated to their own special day in history.
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October 15, 2007
I spent the day at the 2007 Widget Summit today as I spoke on a session about Personalized Homepages. The day was filled with some excellent session about, as you might guess widgets of all ways, shapes and forms. Widget Summit closed day one with a launching pad.
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October 10, 2007
ffwd or "fast forward," a San Francisco-based startup formerly known as "Vadver," recently launched into private beta looking to offer users a discovery mechanism for online videos. ffwd is the brainchild Patrick Koppula, former COO of music recommendations site iLike. I got a chance to take a closer look at the private beta and provided some analyst.
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October 5, 2007
Are you tired of keeping track of several travel itineraries from your hotel, flight and car rental reservations? TripIt is here to help organize your trips for you. TripIt makes it as easy as forwarding your itineraries to plans@tripit.com and it immediately starts organizing your trips.
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October 4, 2007
Email management is something I have written about several times. Most recently, I highlighted Xobni which has helped organize and expose some of the hidden social aspects of email. However, Xobni does not file or read your mail for you. SimplyFile, an Outlook utility by TechHit, helps to organize and file your email in one click.
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October 2, 2007
BAAGZ launched this past week at the DEMOfall 2007 conference to offer a social take on the personalized home page or startpage built on search. Built on the idea that "baagz" are a collection of sites, feeds, notes, videos and photos, Baagz enables users to organize and share their favorite stuff.
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October 1, 2007
BeFunky, a startup which was founded as a spin off of the more manually artist driven IamCartoon project, offers a few fun little applications to allow users to easily create and customize photos as cartoons and create personal avatars. BeFunky recently showed its stuff at TechCrunch40.
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September 28, 2007
Music Shake, a Korean born startup, captivated the audience at TechCrunch40 last week in San Francisco. Music Shake makes is easy to create music with its easy to use application.I gave Music Shake a whirl last night to if creating a song was as easy as it looked on the stage of TechCrunch40.
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September 27, 2007
Mixx launched last week to offer up a social news site for the mainstream to explore. Founded by Chris McGill, Mixx aims to offer a place for large publishing companies to get into the social media space.
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September 24, 2007
Having problems getting through all of your feeds in your reading list? Keeping up with the latest news from all the various publications can sometimes be as difficult as keeping up with your email where "email bankruptcy" runs rampant. FeedHub, a product of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke, has launched its personalized feed and recommendation product at the DEMO Conference. FeedHub creates a personalized RSS feed from you reading list and intelligently displays the most relevant post.
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September 21, 2007
MeeVee, a Silicon Valley-based personalized TV startup, has recently announced a partnership with Amazon to offer TV content via their Unboxed Video Previewer widget. The MeeVee product offers a personalized TV listings and video content. With its sites set on being the a personalized Joost-like product without having to install any software MeeVee will now be leveraging Amazon's widget distribution channel. Amazon widgets can be found at: http://widgets.amazon.com.
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September 13, 2007
While there are a number of Web 2.0, Ajax, personalized home page products that leverage syndication for content updates. I recently found three applications that seem to lean towards a more minimalist visual bookmarking startpage approach. In this article, I will take a closer look these products, so as to point out some alternative approaches to the classic personalized startpage.
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September 11, 2007
Looking for a reaction from a tee shirt? Reactee offers the ability to create customized tee shirts that might just get the reaction you are looking for via SMS text message. Reactee, a project of TextMarks, allows a user to setup a keyword to text to 41411. By simply sending a specified keyword to 41411 you will receive a response text message created by the tee shirt creator.
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September 2, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending September 2, 2007.
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August 27, 2007
Moo, a UK-based printing startup, launched Moo StickerBooks in July and Frank Gruber of SomewhatFrank.com finally got his in the mail. Check out what these Moo Stickers in the wild in this short video clip.
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August 26, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 26, 2007.
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August 20, 2007
Animoto, a New York-based startup, offers an application that generates movie trailer-like videos from your photos. Simply upload or pull in some of your favorite photos, add music and Animoto does the rest.
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August 19, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 19, 2007.
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August 15, 2007
Engagd, created by Faraday Media, has launched to offer web developers a toolkit of services for tracking attention data (the things users do on the Web). Leveraging Attention Profiling Mark-up Language or APML, Engagd offers a few different Web services empowering users to control their own personal Attention Profiles, and developers to quickly and easily add Attention Awareness to their applications and mashups.
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August 13, 2007
iTunes has been offering personalized recommendations within the iTunes application for quite sometime and I have found them to be very accurate and helpful. I have often discovered new songs that I like within the recommendations and downloading them quickly for instant gratification. iTunes has started to role out syndication of personalized music data as My iTunes Widgets, making it easy to share your music interests.
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August 12, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 12, 2007.
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August 9, 2007
Global Grind, currently in private alpha, is a New York-based web 2.0 personalized home page startup that is said to be focused on the "hip hop" generation. Being a "hip hop" listener I was curious to see what this intriguing value proposition was all about. Driven by curiosity, which was said to have killed the cat, I was expecting Global Grind personalized home page to bounce with a Jay-Z hip hop beat or something. That was not the case, Global Grind is a personal home page product with parity with a number of personalized home page products on the market (i.e. widgets, drag and drop, etc). I thought that some of its design element decisions and button placements were a little odd.
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August 5, 2007
Photo of the Week: Barry Bonds hit home run 755 last night in a game vs. San Diego tying Hank Aaron for most career home runs in Major League history. John Feeley was in attendance and captured history with his zoom lens in this shot (shown above). Somewhat Frank Weekly...
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August 2, 2007
Does the photo below look familiar? You might recall the photo of myself with my good friend and popular blogger Orli Yakuel, which I clowned with the Graphita tool-set for a TechCrunch article I wrote while at Web 2.0 Expo last April. Graphita has officially launched Live Studio to make...
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July 29, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of bub.blicio.us at the TechCrunch event in Menlo Park, California on Friday evening (Suits Suck tee shirt photo explained in first story below). Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.29.07 TechCrunch 9 & A Funny "Suit"? I was in attendance for...
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July 27, 2007
RSS Mixer is a simple application for mixing multiple RSS feeds together into one feed. Interestingly, you can then take the new feed and output a custom feed for your iPhone, an Apple Widget, snaggable widget or feed reader. I created a feed mashup for TECH cocktail and Somewhat Frank...
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July 22, 2007
Photo of the Week: I took a trip to Sausalito yesterday and took in some gorgeous sites including this little red sailboat in the Bay. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.22.07 Google Maps: A users guide to personalization LifeHacker offers a guide to personalizing Google Maps. The Impact of Facebook's Platform...
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July 18, 2007
One Llama, a product of six employee Champaign, Illinois-based startup One Llama Media, leverages audio analysis, search and discovery systems to offer a place for music lovers to discover, listen, share and buy new music. Though in the music discovery category, One Llama differs from Last.fm, Pandora and MyStrands by...
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July 17, 2007
Streakr just rolled into beta to offer a content discovery toolbar and social networking product. You may experience deja vu when exploring Streaker as it might remind you of StumbleUpon. The Streakr toolbar offers a couple of different ways to discover and rate content that map directly to StumbleUpon. Check...
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July 15, 2007
Photo of the week: These green frog cupcakes were spotted and then were quickly devoured at the most recent TECH cocktail in Chicago. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.15.07 AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking Nielsen/NetRatings will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in order...
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July 14, 2007
Pimping your ride, ripping your jeans, popping your collar and putting lime in your water are all expressions of your personality. Thus you are personalizing your experience. Your web experience can also be personalized making it your web. Personalization is all about you. Jen Consalvo, Director of Personalization at AOL,...
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July 11, 2007
If you have an iPhone you may be trying to figure out a way to optimize your widget experience. Mojits offers a potential solution as it provides a place to find web widgets optimized for the iPhone. Currently, Mojits offers a couple dozen web widget options which include AIM iPhone...
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July 10, 2007
Today myAOL, a personalization product suite, has officially been released to the beta. As the myAOL Product Manager, I feel like our team just gave birth to triplets, as myAOL offers up three applications into one integrated dashboard experience with various levels of personalization. We hope you like it. I...
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July 9, 2007
AdaptiveBlue, a company founded by Alex Iskold a contributor to Read/Write Web, offers a couple of different ways to create a smarter browsing and personalized experience by connecting users with an array of services. By leveraging Mozilla's platform AdaptiveBlue has created BlueOrganizer, a Firefox extension that makes it easy to...
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July 1, 2007
Photo of the Week: I spotted this sole mushroom while visiting 'the country' in Illinois. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.01.07 iPhone Mania Turns To AT&T Activation Hell The iPhone caused quite a stir and it appears Apple handled demands very well as it was almost too easy to get the...
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June 23, 2007
BlogTV is an Israel-based company that enables people to create their own live broadcast channel on the Web. Similar to UStream.tv, BlogTV empowers anyone with a webcam to create a destination channel for broadcasting live episodes. I got a chance to sit down with BlogTV Vice President of Product &...
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Jun